August 27, 1995|By DAVID G. SMITH
It was called "the crime of the century." It had everything -- the presence of an American icon, a world-renowned celebrity. One of the country's most famous lawyers for the defense. A vast amount of physical evidence apparently implicating the
defendant, but also charges that some of it had been planted by overzealous detectives and accusations of evidence tampering. It was an expensive trial, with a sequestered jury whose ability to remain impartial under the glare of incredible publicity and press coverage was doubted.
No, not the O. J. Simpson trial, but the trial 60 years earlier of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnapping and murder in May 1932 of the 20-month-old Lindbergh baby boy. My father's father, Elmer Smith, was Juror No. 6. With the spotlight that is now focused on the Simpson jurors, I often think about my grandfather. How did he feel during the trial and deliberations? What evidence did he find personally compelling? How did he handle the press attention?
My grandfather died long before I was born (He was 45 when the trial took place). What little I know about him is augmented in large part by the trial. My father says that everyone in all of Hunterdon County, N.J., wanted to be on that jury. Elmer Smith must have been pleased to have been selected.
In the jury box, he was seated on the front row, next to Ethel Stockton. Mrs. Stockton was 32 and reporters nicknamed her the "Bombshell of the Box."
Both had legal experience, my grandfather as a justice of the peace, Mrs. Stockton as a stenographer to the Hunterdon County prosecutor. Both sides accepted them as jurors quickly, and a reporter for the Chicago Tribune suggested both the state and defense knew "all about these two jurors and had made up their minds they would be fair to both sides."
The jury was sequestered, but there was no way to strictly enforce it in Flemington, N.J., in 1935. Not only did hundreds of locals line up every day to try to get in or at least catch a glimpse of the trial's principals, but much of New York society would come out for the trial.
The jurors had part of the third floor of the Union Hotel blocked off for their use, but there was only one hotel in Flemington, so many of the rest of the trial participants were staying there as well.
At lunch, the jurors were separated from other diners in the crowded hotel dining room by only a screen. Who knows what they may have overheard?
Most disturbing, every morning the state police led them from the hotel to the courthouse through a mob of people, many waving miniature replicas of the ladder used to gain access to the Lindbergh home and shouting, "Burn Hauptmann!" or similar statements.
The jury's ability to remain impartial would be sorely tested. They were also operating under the harsh glare of publicity -- newspapers were devoting a half-dozen pages a day to coverage, and numerous radio personalities had converged on Flemington.
I looked at five or six pictures of the jury in the New York Times, and in all of them my grandfather looks somewhat stiff.
One picture I remember in particular is of the jurors at lunch at the hotel. Most of them are relaxed and laughing in this photograph, some leaning back in their chairs, with napkins under their chins or on their laps. My grandfather has his hands neatly crossed in his lap, just like in all the photos of the jury in the box.
Even in a picture taken during a lull in the trial, when some of the jurors are relaxing, deep in thought, or brushing down the hair at the back of their head, my grandfather still sits with his hands crossed. It's as if he was posing for a portrait.
Perhaps my grandfather felt the situation called for dignity. Apparently, when he was not in the box and out of the range of a camera, he could be quite entertaining. One report described him as "jovial" and another said he was "the practical joker of the jury."
Another description of the jury calls him "citified," though I am at a loss at how citified you could get in the small, nearby town of Lambertville, where he lived.
Physical evidence
During the trial, the state presented an impressive amount of physical evidence linking Hauptmann to the crime. He was tied to the kidnap ladder, the ransom notes, the ransom money and the baby's sleeping suit.
Colonel Lindbergh identified Hauptmann's voice as the one he had heard calling in the cemetery on the night the ransom was exchanged (the cemetery was the drop-off point).
Like the Simpson trial, the Lindbergh case had its share of expert witnesses using the latest tools in scientific investigation.
The jury in particular seemed to be impressed with witnesses like Arthur Koehler, a government wood expert who, through a series of plane marks, linked the wood in the kidnap ladder to wood Hauptmann had bought from a lumber yard. It was also shown that a rail from the ladder came from Hauptmann's attic.
